By: Jeff Scheel. I hope you "Think" our Power Linux community is starting to come together. It's taking some time to bring the pieces together, but we're making progress. Since Rome wasn't built in a day, hopefully you'll understand if the Think Power Linux community takes a couple months. Speaking of Rome and building, did you know that IBM's effort with Power Linux is over 10 years old. Yes, I was one of the original team members focused on putting Linux on the iSeries. That mission grew into the ppc64 kernel and glibc that... [More]

By: Jessica Erber-stark. Check out the Linux Information Center for new information about Improving performance with Advance Toolchain 4.0 About the Advance Toolchain : The Advance Toolchain provides early and easy access to
libraries and the latest compiler technologies for Linux distributions. Over time, these libraries
and latest compiler technologies are integrated into the shipping
distributions. However, the Advance Toolchain contains the latest
tested and supported GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compiler versions,
tailored for... [More]

By: Jeff Scheel. A couple weeks ago, someone sent me a link from the developerWorks PowerVM forum about installing Debian on a POWER7 box. The post was created by Tux11 (Dennis Schneck) who graciously agreed to create a developerWorks wiki. Here is the new Debian 6 on Power7 LPAR wiki. I strongly encourage that if you have interest, if you're running Debian today on POWER, or if you would like to doing so in the future, please help Dennis and the community keep this wiki alive and accurate. I cannot THANK him enough for his efforts in... [More]

By: Jeff Scheel. What an exciting week in Miami, FL!!! I spent last week at Power Technical University, helping people Think Power Linux. We had lots of great discussions. A big "thank you" goes out to all who attended sessions, a bigger "THANK YOU" to those who asked questions and participated in the discussion. Here are some my key thoughts from the event: The interest in Linux continues to increase. Although I don't keep formal counts, attendance at the Linux sessions is up over last year which was better than the... [More]

By: Daisy Chang. Did you know that IBM maintains a site called Linux Alerts dedicated to important notices for Power systems running the Linux operating system? This site is updated whenever a known issue is discovered. See the Linux Alerts site for new updates that are required for some Power7 servers and adapters .

By: Jeff Scheel. Two weeks ago, I blogged about my thoughts after attending Power Technical University in Miami. This week, I bring you my thoughts from our event in Copenhagen, Denmark. It never ceases to amaze me what I learn at these events. While the topics I presented were identical to the session in Miami two weeks ago, I still learned a bundle from the Power Linux customers who attended in Copenhagen. Here are my thoughts from this week: Again, I took a significant number of business cards to Copenhagen and still ran out before the... [More]

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } By: Brent Baude. I just wanted to bring some attention
to the recent announcement around a Fedora 16 Alpha for ppc64.
Detials can be found in the release announcement . While this is only an Alpha, it has proven to be a rather decent
effort and quite stable.
For those with ppc64 hardware, I would
encourage you to check out the release notes for the alpha. This should give you some insight into any problems we have
already identified. To find out where to download the Fedora... [More]

By: Jessica Erber-Stark. Need a quick reference for setting up your Power Linux system? See Getting started with Linux on Power Systems Servers . After your system is up and running, use the IBM Installation Toolkit Simplified Setup Tool to easily configure open source workloads . Many of our Power Linux users also asked for a concise guide about setting up virtualization on their system. The Getting started with virtualization using PowerVM topic provides an overview of the roadmap for virtualizing your system, specifics about the... [More]

By: Brent Baude. Fedora has announced a ppc64 Fedora 16 beta last week. The announcement can be found at the following URL: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F16_Beta_PPC_release_announcement There are many improvements between the Alpha and Beta for ppc64. Many of them revolve around automated console detection for IBM ppc64 hardware. The desktop is also improved and we now have a functioning Firefox. This is a community-based effort and as
such we encourage folks to participate. The best mechanism to speak
with the team behind this... [More]

By: Brent Baude. Fedora 16 has now been officially released! The release notes can be found at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_16_PPC_release_notes Most of the imperfections mentioned in the release notes are around graphics/video cards. This is something that will be looked at closer in upcoming Fedora releases. Most significantly, this marks the first official Fedora release for ppc64 since the Fedora 12 time frame. Our preliminary feedback on Fedora for ppc64 has been positive. There a number of instances where it is being... [More]

By: Jeff Scheel. At the risk of appearing more literate than I actually am, I thought a title reference to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous Sonnet 43 How Do I Love Thee? was a great way to introduce the topic for this blog. So, how many ways can we run Linux on IBM Power Systems? Let me count them: Linux can run as the whole system image (single partition, LPAR) on the system with all resources available to it -- processors, memory and I/O adapters. This is the traditional, non-virtualized configuration typical of x86 servers and... [More]

By: Jeff Scheel. Ever wondered what IBM means when they say "Power Linux"? I get questions all the time like, "How does Power Linux differ from RHEL or SLES?" So, I thought perhaps it might be time to address this in writing, in a common place.
Here's the simple answer: Power Linux generally refers to all supported Linux distributions that run on IBM Power Systems servers. This means that Power Linux includes all Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) versions. We simply say... [More]

By: Wainer dos Santos Moschetta. It was released the version 0.9.5 of IBM SDK for PowerLinux with some significant improvements: Enhanced IBM Migration Advisor plug-in Added "ignore warnings" feature Added support for remote execution for the following plug-ins: HOT! Autotools plug-in RPM plug-in IBM Trace Analyzer plug-in New Debian/Ubuntu .deb package with x86_64 IDE client for the IBM SDK for PowerLinux The IBM SDK for PowerLinux is a free of charge offering ! You can download the version 0.9.5 here . Please visit the IBM SDK... [More]